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9 Answers
9

Openshot

OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats.

PiTiVi:

Pitivi is really shaping up with more great things (such as video effects) on the horizon.
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NightwishFanOct 11 '10 at 8:19

I'd pick Pitivi over Openshot because it just works while Openshot feels really strange to use. If you don't need effects and just need to edit videos, Pitivi is perfect. Otherwise look at Openshot.
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mniessOct 22 '10 at 19:51

It's still very basic compared to other tools, and even the latest versions crash all the time.
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culebrónFeb 7 '13 at 11:42

Much easier interface than Openshot: visible audio waveform, video thumbnails on the timeline, good keyboard shortcuts, copy-paste from timestamp, which is more precise, not a cpu hog.
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nealmcbOct 25 '13 at 4:11

You don't have to use KDE to try kdenlive. It's available from the Ubuntu Software Centre and runs great in default Ubuntu Gnome environment.
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Mat TomaszewskiOct 11 '10 at 10:15

@Mat: I am well aware of that fact. on my GNOME environment, kdenlive requires 94 additional packages as its dependencies. Without knowing the benefits one might get out of it, it just looks too heavy-weight is the point.
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GödelOct 11 '10 at 11:42

2

It seems silly to avoid using an otherwise good application because it has KDE-based dependencies. It's perfectly fine to run apps that depend on parts of KDE in gnome, and won't harm you or your desktop environment at all. Linux distros are supposed to be about bringing software together, not segregating it into all GTK/Gnome-based apps for Gnome or all Qt/KDE-based apps for KDE. If your package manager allows it, go ahead and mix-and-match. Gnome even does a fairly good job of integrating (some) KDE apps some of the time. kdenlive looks quite distinctive though.
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neon_overloadApr 22 '12 at 10:28

Excellent question, because at this time it has not been addressed. I know exactly what you are going through. I've been down that road of frustration. I tried everything in the repos and everything I could manage to successfully compile. One app stood out above them all: OpenShot. Try it out.

It's in the repos, No confusing compiling necessary.

It has an intuitive interface.

It's stable.

Decent package of features.

There is one small dependency you might need for some hd wide-screen output but that's it.

I would suggest:

Vlc to make your clips

Audacity to edit your audio

Gnome-subtitles to add subtitles if you need

OpenShot to build your audio/video project

That's the real aspiring Directors package right there, when the professional stuff is out of reach, or for the hobbiest.

OpenShot also has a forum where you can showcase what you've done.

If you need any help getting vlc to make clips, just ask me, it can be a little confusing the first clip. OpenShot is so intuitive, I'd be surprised if you asked a question. I tried all the others, and finally found OpenShot last. OpenShot is what you want. Beat the others hands down.

Save often, and save using Number, i.e., projectSave#1, projectSave#2, etc. You can go back to a previous state if you change your mind or have a strange issue.

Do not use an exported video as a source to build another video, every time you convert, quality will degrade. Use only direct source if possible with clips.

Do not use clips that are too long.

Do not move clips outside of you project folder, or you will disable your project.

Buy some RAM if you've been putting it off. It will smooth things out.

If you notice something out of the ordinary with the program itself, save then, and see if the bug goes away, or to go back to your last save. Otherwise if you continue to work, there is a potential for loss of work.

Keep a processor monitor up while you work, and if you apply an operation that consume lots of processor percentage, wait till it's done. I'm impatient and multi-task and crashed OpenShot because I tried to apply too many operations that had a heavy load all too close to one another.

Make sure you are up to date on your codecs!

With that in mind, some of the other editors would not even start or crash once a clip was added, or just flat out not work. OpenShot will get the project done if you take those things in mind.

You didn't answer fully: what's so great about it? Add a link maybe? :)
–
badpOct 11 '10 at 11:48

6

Blender is a very powerful tool, I've worked with it recently and was very impressed. It's essentially a 3D-modelling and animation platform, but also has video editing capabilities (which I haven't tested yet). It's worth giving a go, but I'd recommend watching some tutorials first, as the UI has an unusual logic, which takes a while to get used to. The interaction model is very consistent though, and optimised for productivity. Overall, it's one of the most mature and impressive graphic design packages with an open license. Check blender.org
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Mat TomaszewskiOct 11 '10 at 13:25

DVBcut

DVBcut is a Qt application that allows you to select certain parts of an MPEG transport stream (as received via Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB) and save these parts into a single MPEG output file. It follows a "keyhole surgery" approach where the input video and audio data is mostly kept unchanged, and only very few frames at the beginning and/or end of the selected range are re-encoded in order to obtain a valid MPEG file.

If you have a DVB recorder or a digital TV card and want to cut off some parts from your recordings (like commercials) frame-exactly without re-encoding the whole file, use DVBcut. Not suitable for most other purposes.